An X glitch is breaking native images, links posted before December 2014

A glitch on X, formerly Twitter, seems to have broken links and images posted using the social network’s native service before December 2014.

Over the weekend, a few people speculated that images — including the famous Oscar selfie — were deleted from the service. However, other users pointed out that images are still on the server. At least the Oscar selfie seems to be restored in embeds. But there are plenty of media and links still missing.

X’s Developer Documentation (via The Verge) notes that the platform started showing previews of pictures, GIFs, and links starting in 2016. However, such metadata for tweets “began emerging” in December 2014.

“In July 2016, the enhanced URL enrichment was introduced. This enhanced version provides a website’s HTML title and description in the Tweet payload, along with Operators for matching those. With Historical PowerTrack, these metadata become available in July 2016. With the Search APIs, these metadata begin emerging in December 2014,” the documentation reads.

This probably explains why links and images posted before December 2014 using Twitter’s native service seem currently broken. Users commenting on a Reddit post have also speculated that this bug was caused by the company trying to shift servers to X.com.

The company executives including Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino haven’t made any comments about this bug.

Over the last few days, the platform has been engulfed in controversy after Musk said the company is planning to remove the ability to block users and introduce a new version of the mute feature instead.